A variety of methods exist today that allow consumers to write reviews of books, products, merchants, restaurants, and other topics. For example, Amazon.com® allows customers to write reviews of products purchased from Amazon®. EBay.com® asks sellers and buyers to review each other, not on the actual product transacted, but on the quality of the transaction itself. Epinions.com®, Shopping.com®, and Bizrate.com® focus on providing reviews of products and merchants to potential consumers, but do so as a shopping portal. Other sites that focus on specific verticals, such as DiamondReview.com™, provide reviews only within the diamond jewelry industry.
For a buying consumer, reviews can be an important part of the purchase decision for a given product or service. However, the state of reviews found on the Internet today is such that many of the reviews cannot be fully trusted. Many reviews are written by sellers (or person's affiliated with sellers) that falsely pose as past buyers, and are therefore biased in favor of the seller. Since it is at best difficult, and usually impossible, to tell the good reviews from the biased reviews, the entire notion of using reviews to make a purchase decision becomes less useful than it could be. Therefore there is no existing system that provides trusted relevant reviews to consumers.